I've noticed that the two new limited TS3 sets (pizza truck and garbage truck) have all printed pieces with no stickers while the other TS3 sets are stickered. What gives? Are the stores that contract for the exclusive sets demanding printed pieces? It kind of throughs a big fat wrench into all of our arguments over why TLG is putting stickers in the sets in the first place. Both these sets seemed fairly popular in the forums and it seems that many of the members are willing to pay for them. Bring back printed pieces in all sets.

The people here that are defending sticlers can lie to themselves all they want. But lets get REAL. EVERBODY HATES stickers. As for pricing its inflation on the worlds economy as a whole. Don't tell me its to expensive to print a brick. Mass producing sticker sheets should be just as high if not higher. This crap started in 2005 and what happen in the 1970's sets went away for about 1980's-2004. No excuse!

Those are some strong words purporting to know my own thoughts on sticker use. I'm of two minds, and it really depends on the situation. For example, I recently built the Death Star Playset, and that set is rife with stickers. I didn't put any on (as I pretty much never do now) and I kind of wish that the pieces were printed. I don't remember off-hand, and I don't feel like going downstairs to check, but I think some of the stickers may have been intended to cover multiple pieces at once, which would make having it look good be much more difficult than just the singular sticker. But for the vast majority of them, at least, I wish the pieces were printed.

On the other hand, I got Construct-a-Zurg mostly to have the purple parts. The cone for the bottom of Zurg's head is printed with his yellow frown. I've never wished that a piece was intended for sticker rather than printing so badly. I understand that applying a sticker to a curved piece may be much more difficult than a flat piece, but now I've got to do the whole Brasso process to get that goofy-looking mouth off my purple cone.

I'm known to have a tremor sometimes & decalling a 2x4 slope for a control panel can be troublesome. The other pieces I noticed were difficult to do correctly were the hatches on the ARC180. By the same token, some of the new tricks they build into these sets make me not care about stickers at all. The Republic Attack Shuttle comes to mind. Maybe it's because I'm new on the scene, but when I built the bomb drop/armor/wing assembly I was blown away. For me that's the stuff that really makes this a fun hobby.

My #1 beef with the stickers is that if I'm watching a game, having a beer & putting a set together I rarely look ahead to see that a sticker is going to be used. My centering skills when it comes to stickers is much nicer if the piece isn't already on the assembly.

possum wrote:My #1 beef with the stickers is that if I'm watching a game, having a beer & putting a set together I rarely look ahead to see that a sticker is going to be used. My centering skills when it comes to stickers is much nicer if the piece isn't already on the assembly.

Not only that, but if you are REassembling a set that includes stickers, it would be nice to know, in the step that a piece goes on, that it has a sticker...not four pages later.

I like it when LEGO uses stickers for patterns that I think are stupid, because then I don't have to use them. I don't want a Spongebob-style cartoony porthole sticker on my 1x4x3 panel, thank you. If LEGO used a printed element for that instead, I'd never use it. But since they use a sticker, now I can use that part! Hooray!

However, other parts like computer terminals and racing stripes and things are pretty generic, and are handy to have-- So I'd prefer prints in those cases.

But in general, this is pretty accurate, I think-- is there anyone out there that actually would prefer to have a stickered part rather than a printed part, assuming that they actually were going to USE the sticker/print?

legofett wrote:As for pricing its inflation on the worlds economy as a whole. Don't tell me its to expensive to print a brick. Mass producing sticker sheets should be just as high if not higher. This crap started in 2005 and what happen in the 1970's sets went away for about 1980's-2004. No excuse!

That's just silly. For LEGO, printed parts cost more than stickers, and I defy you to show evidence to the contrary. And no, "they did it in 1986" is not evidence.

As for the timeframe, I don't understand what you're talking about by "2005". It sounds like you're implying that stickers didn't exist from 1980-2004, and suddenly started reappearing in 2005? But that's obviously not true. 6685 had stickers in 1982. 4030 had stickers in 1987. 8856 had stickers in 1991. The list goes on. I can't even FIND a year after 1971 during which there were no stickers.

That does potentially make for an interesting experiment, though-- what percentage of sets have had sticker sheets for each year, say from 1970-2010? If we only count sets for which there are inventories on BrickLink, it should be a manageable investigation.

I don't think there's a hard-and-fast line in the sand when stickers suddenly started becoming "too frequent". I think it's been pretty gradual. But if someone wants to go through and find out that percentage, I'll be interested to see if there's a bona fide "jump" in any given year.

legofett wrote:The people here that are defending sticlers can lie to themselves all they want. But lets get REAL. EVERBODY HATES stickers. As for pricing its inflation on the worlds economy as a whole. Don't tell me its to expensive to print a brick. Mass producing sticker sheets should be just as high if not higher. This crap started in 2005 and what happen in the 1970's sets went away for about 1980's-2004. No excuse!

Indeed this is a very "rant-y" POV. I really don't mind stickers that much. I mean, so it's not as convenient or high-quality, your whining isn't going to change TLC's mind. You really are starting to tick me off. So if TLC started using printings, that means that piece would only be useful for that particular set (most likely). Now TLC would have to make a whole different production line for that piece. It wastes a lot of time and money to do that. It is almost as expensive as making new molds. In your timeframe, TLC only seemed totally devout about printing for LSW. As it seems, LSW is always the last to fall to new methods (flesh-tones, white pupils). You should just be thankful that TLG often treats LSW with more care.

But in general, this is pretty accurate, I think-- is there anyone out there that actually would prefer to have a stickered part rather than a printed part, assuming that they actually were going to USE the sticker/print?

Not neccesarily, there's a huge difference between hating something and preferring a different method.

Another thing about stickers, it that they can bring a lot to MOCs. For example, you couldn't have bullet holes or japanese characters on a mech or ship without stickers! I mostly dislike stickers in SW. But now I've actually realized how useful they are.